In kvm, let’s say you want to create a new disk and attach it to a virtual machine. You could use Virtual Machine Manager. But for the command line, here is a quick way how to do it.

Create a disk

Create a qcow2 disk that is fully allocated. When I tried with disks that were not fully allocated, the vm would only see the 200K or so and would not let me write a partition table large enough to do anything.

Attach a disk

You can omit the flags as needed, if you don’t want to update the virtual machine’s definition, or –config. And some of these are probably redundant, but they did not throw errors for me and I wanted the change to be immediate and persistent upon vm reboot, so I leave them all in.

Resizing a live logical volume

If you use lvm to abstract the filesystems away from the direct hardware, you might need to know how to add additional space without taking the filesystem offline. This post shows how you might do that.

Attach new disk

Save current state to a file for comparison.

ls -l /dev/{s,v}d* > ~/ls.dev.sd.before

Install additional disk to system (in hypervisor or attach to physical machine).
Scan with rescan-scsi-bus.sh (from sg3_utils package).
If that fails, try